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Guest Blog: Artist Caroline McCarthy

Tue Sep 2nd, 2014

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Irish artist Caroline McCarthy recently worked in collaboration with Marguerite O’Molloy, Assistant Curator: Collections IMMA, to select a number of works from the IMMA Collection for Group Coordination an exciting new project which also incorporates works on loan from McCarthy’s studio.
Borrowing its title from a sculptural still life by McCarthy, Group Coordination is part of the current IMMA Collection: Conversations exhibition. Below, Caroline writes a blog for IMMA on the project:

Caroline McCarthy, Group Coordination (Red),2011, installed at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014

Group Coordination is a drawing as big as the space; a journey which explores its architecture, responding to paintings and window ledges alike.

Similar to my work The Luncheon, 2002, it works from a palette of everyday found materials and follows a certain logic in constructing itself: straws are straight lines which can change direction and colour; cigarette filter tips join them seamlessly; cable clips are the hanging system. Objects to hand are drafted in to anchor the drawing such as a clothes peg, a waste-paper bin, a rhino eraser from the Museum shop.
Inadvertently their positioning forms a kind of odd still life. In contrast Fergus Martin’s Table takes everything out, and by doing so puts everything imaginable in; or you start to see things like dirt and scratches, holes and nails.

We always look for meaning, where dumb, even empty, objects speak to us. Standing face to face with a bronze cast of a woman’s silenced head, Unveiling by Janine Antoni invites (or dares you more like) to strike it like a bell.

Terry Atkinson’s still lifes are equally uncomfortable without having to strike them. As the titles or the ‘leads’ suggest, violent disruption is imminent, at least in the mind. Enrico Baj looks on; loose scraps assembled in a rectangle, unblinking circles, looking at you; looking ahead into the dark; terrified or crazy? We must be.

Production films a cheap and cheerful Ikea vase being kicked about the studio. It is a form of uncontrollable making, involving a process which is at the same time both destructive and productive.

still fromProduction, 2011

The film documents the transformation of a mass-produced object into something unique and irreplaceable, its damage being impossible to reproduce exactly, and therefore precious. It’s not intended as a statement about consumerism, nor is The Luncheon, so much as exploring the language, the systems, and boundaries of art, display and everyday things (which often come from a shop). Michael Craig-Martin paints brightly coloured objects as if fresh from the pound store, but it’s how these things get re-presented which bring an ordinary bucket to interestingly different outcomes in On the Table and Eye of the Storm.Installation shot showing Michael Craig Martin On The Table, 1971 (left foreground) with McCarthy’s Production, 2011 and Paul Klee Flowers in Glasses, 1925 (background left and also below)

I like how in art the same things get borrowed and recycled over again and over the centuries to different ends, like heads, or tables, or flowers — when they stop being flowers, and become a vehicle for something else; or when a rhino makes a journey from real life through Warhol (via Dürer maybe), to an eraser in the Museum shop. Before rubbing itself out.
Caroline McCarthy, London, 2014